Communist University 2013

Preparations for the Communist University, our annual school, are well advanced and the 2013 timetable features some outstanding speakers on key issues. The CPGB website will be regularly updated with tweaks to the timetable and profiles of our speakers, but here are a few who have confirmed so far and the subjects they will be addressing:

* Hillel Ticktin is one of the leading Marxist political economists in the world. Originally from South Africa, he left the country to avoid arrest for political activism. After some time working for his PhD in the Soviet Union – where he again attracted the disapproval of the authorities – he began teaching at the University of Glasgow in 1965, and in 1973 he co-founded Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, an independent, scholarly Marxist journal. Comrade Ticktin has been a regular atCommunist University over years and a frequent contributor to our paper. He will be presenting three sessions for us in August – ‘Capitalist crises and the causes’ (Wednesday, August 14), ‘Capitalism: terminal crisis or long term decline?’ (Thursday, August 15) and ‘Socialism or barbarism’ (Saturday, August 17).

* The left’s response to the global crisis of capitalism has been essentially Keynesian. So the title of our morning session on Friday, August 16 – ‘Does Keynesianism offer an alternative to austerity?’ – is apposite for all those who regard themselves as Marxists, or revolutionaries of some stripe. It is presented by the CPGB’s Mike Macnair, a member of the party’s leadership and a frequent contributor to the Weekly Worker. Mike has written and spoken on this subject in the past and it is clearly one that we need to keep returning to given the left’s stubborn insistence that this non-Marxist (actually anti-Marxist) politics is a supportable ‘alternative’ to capitalist austerity.

* OnTuesday, August 13 Mike Gonzalez will be discussing with Nick Rogers the question, ‘After Chavez: where next for the Bolivarian revolution?’ Mike has written widely on Latin America from the state capitalist perspective of the International Socialist tradition of Tony Cliff. (See his Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution). He is a historian, a prolific author and literary critic. For a time, he also was the professor of Latin American Studies in the Hispanics department of the University of Glasgow. He was videoed speaking on ‘The politics of water’ at a Socialist Workers Party (Ireland) event in November of last year.

*Yassamine Mather is an Iranian socialist in exile in Britain. Her political activities on the Iranian left started in 1980s Tehran and later in Kurdistan. In exile, she has been on the editorial board of the monthly journal Jahan and a member of the coordinating committee of Workers Left Unity Iran. She is also a member of the Centre for Socialist Theory and Movements (Glasgow University) and the deputy editor of the journalCritique. Since 2007 she has been active in Hands Off the People of Iran (HOPI).She will be speaking in a debate on feminism(s) with Camilla Power.

*Camilla Power is a senior lecturer in evolutionary anthropology at the University of East London, with a particular interest in female coalitionary strategies, ritual and early human kinship. She uses modern Darwinian selfish-gene sexual selection theory to understand the origins of symbolic culture. She is a leading member of the Radical Anthropology Group and has spoken frequently at Communist University. She will be speaking in a debate on feminism(s) with Yassamine Mather.

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Comrades attending Communist University for the first time often remark that its culture is very different to other left schools. For example, writing in the Weekly Worker Paul Demarty regrets the “cosy diplomatic speechifying” that generally characterises the annual Marxism school staged by the Socialist Workers Party. This flows from a tacit “diplomatic arrangement” between the event organisers and the ‘star’ non-SWP speakers – the “horse trading” consists of “the SWP granting the speaker a large and enthusiastic audience in central London. In return, the speaker offers the SWP an implicitendorsement of the image it wishes to project: a non-sectarian, unifying force on the radical left, offering up its resources to ‘build the movement’.”

Our school actually makes an effort to explore real differences between comrades, to give critical minorities the time and space to make their arguments and to challenge comrades’ pre-conceptions. We are genuinely out to educate, in other words – both ourselves and others. In the lead up to last year’s CU, we made this video with the CPGB’s national organiser, Mark Fischer, to give comrades a feel for the event.